Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade by Siân Rees

The story of the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act may be well known, but the story of Britain's attempts to enforce the act is not; 17,000 sailors died (many from disease) along the west African coast in the half century or so after 1807, as British warships patrolled 3,000 miles of malaria-infested shore in a vicious game of cat and mouse with slavers from Spain, Portugal, America, Brazil and France.

Siân Rees's spirited book wants to rescue these sailors from obscurity, and defend the 'Preventive Squadron' in which they served from the opprobium of recent historians, who have either belittled Britain's efforts (too few ships for such a mammoth task), or accused it of using philanthropy as a front for imperialism. Rees's story is certainly gripping - slavers used all sorts of ruses to evade capture, from running up a different flag (only certain countries had legal agreements with